101 Years At Sea: Oldest Message Ever Found in Bottle Reveals German Roots

An old brown beer bottle had been bobbing in the sea for 101 years before fisherman Konrad Fischer plucked it out of the Baltic along with his daily catch.

Richard Platz, who was 20 years old when he set the bottle adrift in 1913, rolled up a postcard inside and requested that a message be mailed to him at his home address in Berlin. In the bottle he included two stamps from the German Empire to pay for postage.

The bottle, postcard and stamps went on display at a maritime museum in Hamburg while a local genealogical researcher traced the man’s ancestors to a woman in Berlin.

Angela Erdmann, 62, never knew her grandfather. He died in 1946, six years before she was born. But on Tuesday she described the extraordinary moment when she received a message in a bottle 101 years after he had lobbed it into the Baltic Sea.